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Three of my clients have been asking me for a while now, if it was possible to "give some people access to the local nas", via their dsl.

I think that is beyond stupid for several reasons, so I try to propose a dedicated server with some open source cloud software, hence I am asking for your advice.

The clients all know each other, they have their offices in the same building, they already share printers and meeting rooms.

All of them need to share stuff for inhouse employees who work on building sites, etc.

All of them need to share lots of 50-100mb pdfs with sub contractors. (They are architects and need to share building plans)

Some of them need to share stuff with partner companies.

Most of the files are project related.

The software should be easy to use and one of their more tech savvy employees should be able to operate it, set permissions, create project based shares, etc. It should be a bit like dropbox, some things should be accessible without authorization, some things should be locked by passwords.

They provide storage, email, a very nice way to collaberate on writing documents
that can be turned into PDFs, and so on. You can choose to share what you
want from the storage.

But it isn't open-source. Well, their APIs are open source, but their technology
itself isn't. If you can't get to the internet, you can't use them. But
if you're talking about cloud solutions, you're already going to need constant
access to the internet, so that shouldn't be a problem.

I think I asked here about an open source cloud solution for business use and somebody told me it was obvious to use owncloud.

Well a friend of mine had some consultants test it for his company, the result was devasting:

They have about 20gb of files and 16k files or something along those numbers. Now owncloud is written in a way that it checks each and every file's hash with the sync server for changes. So in his scenario, a computer had to be continually online for 48h to check if any of those files was actually changed.

And this is not a bug, it is the way it works, they were told by upstream.

Today, these numbers of files and gb are not really uncommon, I guess. Think about movie and audio collections...

My clients do not have to sync barely 6gb in 1k files, but I am currently trying Seafile. Looks nice, relatively easy to install and seems to work so far.